London – Buckingham Palace criticised the top-selling Sun tabloid on Saturday for publishing a previously unknown film from 1933 that appears to show Britain’s Queen Elizabeth performing a Nazi salute as a young girl.
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The black-and-white film from the year Adolf Hitler came to power purports to show the future Edward VIII teaching his nieces, the current British monarch Elizabeth, aged about seven at the time, and her three-year-old sister, Princess Margaret, how to perform the salute.
Dancing and smiling with little apparent understanding of the salute’s significance, the two young girls are encouraged to briefly perform the raised right-arm gesture by Edward in the gardens of Balmoral, a royal estate in Scotland.
The Sun newspaper published the story and the 17-second film on its website under the headline “Their Royal Heilnesses”. Edward also raises his arm, as does his sister-in-law, the Queen Mother.
“It is disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago and apparently from Her Majesty’s personal family archive, has been obtained and exploited in this manner,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.
Edward VIII abdicated after 11 months on the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite, for whom he publicly declared his love. He was succeeded by his younger brother, George VI, father of Queen Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, now 89, will overtake Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-reigning monarch in September. She is widely popular.
Sun Managing Editor Stig Abell said the report was in the public interest and that the tabloid’s eight-page coverage put it in the appropriate historical context.
He did not say how the newspaper, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media business, obtained the footage.
“The purpose of this was never to embarrass the Queen or the palace,” Abell told Sky News.
“You could not find a newspaper more supportive of the royal family than the Sun but you cannot find a newspaper more keen to publish stories in the public interest than the Sun,” he said.
I guess the truth hurts. The royal family was caught being closet Nazis and supporters of them.
they are all the same jew haters from early age.
There’s nothing surprising about this. Edward VIII and his wife were well known early supporters of Hitler. There are pictures you can find online of them with Hitler. Thankfully he wasn’t King for very long.
This story is of no surprise. The queen comes from a family line of rabid Jew haters and her son and grandson carry that very same family tradition.
Why shouldn’t they condemn the Natzi sympathizer instead of the newspaper who showed the truth?
They are a German family. This just reminds everyone of that.
It is the custom for the press to leave royal children alone until they take up official duties. That seems a wise and humane policy.
Fact is, British and German hatred for Jews were, and still is equal, as is the hatred for us of the rest of the “civilized” world.
The only difference between the British and Nazis was that they were on opposite sides of the war.
Had the British been as efficient and meticulous as the Germans, they’d probably have done the same.
Only chasdei Hashem made them more laid back, so a to provide a venue from which to launch the defeat of the Nazi regime.
There is a deep steam of perpetual Jew hating in the Brit upper classes, or whatever is left of them. London mayor is the same, and the skinheads, who reintroduced neo nazism to the world in the 1970s. The present Queen seems above it however.
I think that too much of a tsimmis is being made of that silly photo. I remember when I was in camp, a Jewish kid, who was about 11 or 12 years old, also did the same dumb thing. Kids do stupid things. Incidentally, regarding anti-Semitism in the UK, I read that during that Blitz, in 1940, when London was being bombed by the Nazis, there was anti-Semitism which raised its ugly head. Some Londoners actually complained that the Jews in London, were “taking up too much space in the Underground subway stations”. The Jews were there, along with the rest of their fellow Londoners, as the Underground gave them protection against the bombing. However, according to the Brits in London, “THEY had a lot of nerve, not leaving adequate space for the pure Britons”.